If ever again we have a religion in the South Country, we will have a temple to my darling valley.  It shall be round, with columns and a wall, and there I will hang a wreath in thanksgiving for having known the river.

THE CORONATION

My companion said to me that there was a doom over the day and the reign and the times, and that the turn of the nation had come.  He felt it in the sky.

The day had been troubled:  from the forest ridge to the sea there was neither wind nor sun, but a dull, even heat oppressed the fields and the high downs under the uncertain, half-luminous confusion of grey clouds.  It was as though a relief was being denied, and as though something inexorable had come into that air which is normally the softest and most tender in the world.  The hours of the low tide were too silent.  The little inland river was quite dead, the reeds beside it dry and motionless; even in the trees about it no leaves stirred.

In the late afternoon, as the heat grew more masterful, a slight wind came out of the east.  It was so faint and doubtful in quantity that one could not be certain, as one stood on the deserted shore, whether it blew from just off the land or from the sullen level of the sea.  It followed along the line of the coast without refreshment and without vigour, even hotter than had been the still air out of which it was engendered.  It did not do more than ruffle here and there the uneasy surface of our sea; that surface moved a little, but with a motion borrowed from nothing so living or so natural as the wind.  It was a dull memory of past storms, or perhaps that mysterious heaving from the lower sands which sailors know, but which no silence has yet explained.

In such an influence of expectation and of presage—­an influence having in it that quality which seemed to the ancients only Fate, but to us moderns a something evil—­in the strained attention for necessary and immovable things that cannot hear and cannot pity—­the hour came for me to reascend the valley to my home.  Already upon the far and confused horizon two or three motionless sails that had been invisible began to show white against a rising cloud.  This cloud had not the definition of sudden conquering storms, proper to the summer, and leaving a blessing behind their fury.  The edge of it against the misty and brooding sky had all the vagueness of smoke, and as it rose up out of the sea its growth was so methodical and regular as to disconnect it wholly in one’s mind from the little fainting breeze that still blew, from rain, or from any daily thing.  It advanced with the fall of the evening till it held half the sky.  There it seemed halted for a while, and lent by contrast an unnatural brightness to the parched hills beneath it; for now the sun having set, we had come north of the gap, and were looking southward upon that spectacle as upon the climax of a tragedy.